It stands just 0.66 metres tall and 0.34 metres wide, barely reaching waist height, and is only 0.04 metres thick. Its head is flat rather than the ringed form familiar from larger, more celebrated examples of early Irish stonework. What distinguishes it, quietly, are the two slightly hollowed angles at the corners of its rudimentary arms, a detail suggesting careful if minimal shaping by whoever carved it.

The cross stands close to the south-western side of the Monks' Graveyard on the island, one of several early Christian features that occupy the extraordinary stone terraces built by monks who settled here, likely from around the sixth or seventh century. The community that lived on Skellig Michael, clinging to an Atlantic rock thirteen kilometres off the Iveragh Peninsula, constructed dry-stone beehive cells, oratories, and terraced enclosures at considerable altitude. The graveyard near which this cross stands would have served those monks across generations of occupation. The cross itself was recorded and measured by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, and its description has been revised in the light of subsequent research.